|
|
 Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — how to say "YES" to life, C.S. Lewis on how to structure your days for creative work, and a painted poem about bearing the astonishment of being alive — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting its ongoingness with a donation — for twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
|
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. (“Whatever inspiration is,” one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”)
In a culture that bandaids its fissures with self-righteousness, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to remain undecided, to refuse to mistake for finished the works in progress we are, to remember that our task here is not to be certain but to be true — to our incompleteness, to the open-endedness of life itself, to the unhurried wisdom of the heart. 
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Also available as a print and as stationery cards.)
That is what Jeff Foster celebrates in one of the poems in his altogether wonderful collection of reckonings The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love (public library) — a prayerful invitation to “find a space in your heart for the unwanted, the unloved, the rejected aspects of experience” and to honor the sanctity of your doubts.
 INDECISION
by Jeff Foster
Friend, please,
do not try to decide now.
Do not shut any possibility out of your heart. Honor this place of not knowing.
Bow before this bubbling mess of creativity.
Slow down. Breathe.
Sink into wonderment.
Befriend the very place where you stand.
Any decision will make itself, in time.
Any choice will happen when your defenses are down.
Answers will appear only when they are ready.
When the questions have been fully honored and loved.
Do not label this place “indecision.”
It is more alive than that.
It is a place where possibilities grow.
It is a place where uncertainty is sacred.
There is courage in staying close.
There is strength in not knowing.
There is power in doubt.
Friend, please know,
there is simply no choice now.
Except to breathe, and breathe again,
and trust this Intelligence beyond mind.
A decision will grow, but for today, nourish the ground.
Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book
In the introduction to The Way of Rest, Foster observes: “Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it’s not death we’re afraid of but too much life.” And perhaps this is why we are so eager to foreclose our conclusions — deciding is a way of containing what will otherwise spill into the unbearable infinity of possibility, which is in consequence a way of being less alive. But isn’t the whole point to be more alive, to stop waiting and start living in order not to waste your life?
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
|
one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
 |
|
 |
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it may be long dead. The great wonder is that its light can traverse immense expanses of space and time to gladden the darkness of today, to cast wonder upon this lonely planet.
An idea is a signal that may travel across immense expanses of space and time before it touches the world. Transformative ideas can and often do fall on the closed eyes of their epoch. But, over and over, history hands us the glad assurance that it can take just one person awake enough to receive the signal so that others can then see it, to interpret it so that others can appreciate its singularity, its significance, its beauty. (See, for instance, Fanny Wright and atomism, Girolamo Mercuriale and fitness.) 
Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.
Like a star, a good idea has a gravitational pull that attracts other bodies into its obit. Unlike a star, which invariably runs out of hydrogen fuel and dies, an idea cannot be unthought — once it exists, it is forever lodged in the collective conscience, however deep the recess. Some of humanity’s best ideas come from galaxies of thought so remote from the status quo that their light can take generations or civilizations to touch the world, the faint signal magnified and reflected by a handful of believers like a relay of mirrors across the dark sky of time until it becomes a beacon.
That is what David Byrne chronicles in Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up (public library) — a book masted with passion and ruddered with rigor, celebrating the lost history of creativity through the stories of the forgotten, neglected, and erased visionaries who from the margins of their time wrote the history of the future.
David — one of the most indiscriminately and ardently curious people I know, whose contagious enthusiasms will enchant you with everything from the geometry of trees to the dream culture of Malaysian tribal groups to the mating habits of eels — selects discoveries, inventions, and creations that traverse the vast spectrum of human ingenuity: from painting to astronomy, from music to microbiology, from literature to civil engineering. Some have only recently bubbled to public awareness (Vera Rubin and dark matter, Lynn Margulis and symbiotic life), some are unknown to most, perhaps precisely because they have become so plainly embedded in our model of the world, the model they helped build (Marie Tharp and plate tectonics, Peter Kropotkin and mutualism, the invention of hand-washing), some have transformed our lives in a very practical way (cement, perspective, inoculation), some in a spiritual way (the paintings of Caravaggio and Beauford Delaney, the writings of Melville, the music of Bach), and some have simply dusted our lives with delight (the wonders of lichen).
Reflecting on how such transformative ideas can go dormant for decades (solar panels), centuries (irrigation systems in South India), or millennia (the atom), David observes:
We’ve evolved to rely on whatever assumptions, models, and perception work for us — or at least work most of the time. If it’s right most of the time, or for the time being, then that’s held as proof that our assumptions must be valid and true, and we will be successful. Our faith in our assumptions often temporarily increases our odds of survival and success, until it doesn’t, until the curtain is pulled away and our assumptions are revealed to be just that, assumptions, not grounded in fact or reality.
Art by David Byrne from his illustrated history of the future.
One of our most reflexive and most limiting assumptions is that we are the pinnacle of creative and intellectual development, the past too distant and dumb to offer any ideas better than our own:
Our tendency as humans is often to imagine that the “story” of history leads us to where we are right now. We like to imagine ourselves as some sort of inevitable culmination — it all led to us. What we see, and what we judge as important and significant, viewed in the rearview mirror is determined by how we see ourselves at present.
Undermining the hubris of our own inevitability is the ease with which anything could dislodge us from our chosen course in a blink. An accident is simply our term for a moment in which chance intercedes into our lives to remind us that we are not in control, to remind us that all of our plans and predictions are just provisional models of the possible, which will always exceed our imagination because we ourselves are the possible’s wild bet against probability. Both in their generation and in their rediscovery, revolutionary ideas are often the product of lucky accidents. Observing that such serendipities happen to those who are both prepared and receptive, David offers a taxonomy:
Accidents come in different forms. Something was rediscovered when someone was actually looking for something else, someone realizes that forgotten past research covers similar or even identical ground to their own, or an unpredictable random event makes a discarded idea come into view. But for lucky accidents to be meaningful, the heart, mind, and eyes have to be open.
Looking over this orrery of good ideas, David considers what it takes to make a “sleeping beauty” — a term coined in a 2004 paper on the history of science — come awake: reaching beyond the bounds of your own discipline, welcoming the counterintuitive, using associative rather than analytical thinking, and resisting to the last “the hubris of modernity” by looking to the dusky recesses of the past for neglected ideas that might light up tomorrow.
What emerges from these stories is a reminder that history is not a record of the facts but of the feelings the dominant culture had about the happenings of its time; not a ledger of events but an impressionistic portrait of our collective selective memory, and it is those in power who do the selecting, those least interested in ideas that might change the status quo. Hovering above it all like the shadow of cloud is the awareness that history is happening right now, that we too may be putting good ideas to sleep — but by continually examining our blind spots and biases, we have a chance to keep them awake long enough for their light to blaze the way to the world we want to live in.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
|
one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
|
|
|
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes them good. It has, of course, a lot to do with kindness. It has to do with their capacity to give, and also to receive. It has to do with their courage of uncertainty. And yet like all the great truths, the essence of a person, the goodness of a person, is both clear and ineffable.
In the bleak Siberian winter of 1856, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) — thirty-five, dreaming of being a writer while stationed at a labor camp, having narrowly escaped a death sentence that had given him a lucid glimpse of the meaning of life — sent his older brother a letter of introduction to a young friend whose goodness had touched his life, had changed it. “In the most selfless way he has undertaken to look after my concerns and help me with all his might,” Dostoyevsky tells his brother, “and he loves me.” 
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871
Throughout the ten-page letter, he goes on to enumerate his friend’s noble qualities. Pulsating beneath the particular is a simple, precise articulation of what makes a good person in a universal sense. (In one of the most logically elegant and morally compelling arguments for humanity, Dostoyevsky believed there are no bad people — which is precisely what renders his concern with goodness all the more commanding.)
“He is a very young, very gentle person,” he writes, “but with a strongly developed point of honor, incredibly kind.” In describing his friend’s modest education and intellectual disposition, he makes a subtle, profound point — it is far better to enjoy studying than to be overeducated.
“I live in great poverty,” Dostoyevsky tells his brother, “deny myself everything, and in the meantime I’ve made debts!” Perennially penurious, he was constantly asking friends, relatives, acquaintances, and even near-strangers for loans, which he rarely repaid. His young friend frequently helped him financially and not once asked for the money back, implicitly understanding that money is not a special species of resource, but — like time, like love — just another form of energy that circulates between us, flowing toward where it is most needed. “He blushes when I start up about my debt,” Dostoyevsky writes, “and is even annoyed if I remind him of it” — a beautiful testament to the non-transactional nature of true generosity.
In a passage that calls to mind D.H. Lawrence’s timeless insight into the strength of the sensitive, Dostoyevsky arrives at the young man’s noblest quality. Observing that he is “prone to depression and rather over-anxious,” he reflects on the superpower of his friend’s vulnerability — one all the more needed in our Age of Outrage:
What infuriates and enrages someone else saddens him — the sign of a superior heart.
Couple with Susan Sontag on what it means to be a good human being, then revisit the day Dostoyevsky discovered the meaning of life in a dream.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
|
one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
|
|
|
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
THE MARGINALIAN TURNS 20: COME CELEBRATE!
Details and tickets here.
AN EMBROIDERED CERAMICS RAFFLE...
BIRD DIVINATION OF THE WEEK
Available as a print. Find the full set of 100 bird divinations here.
|
|
|
|
|
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar